While most Hollywood stars wouldn’t think twice about signing off on a crappy movie tie-in game, Vin Diesel takes games seriously–perhaps more seriously than his films, seeing as his virtual performance in The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay was much more well-received than the movie upon which it was based. Now, Midway and Vin Diesel’s Tigon Studios are teaming up for Wheelman, a criminal mission-based driving game, and Midway gave the press a look at the game at its recent Las Vegas event.
Virtual Vin Diesel will play the part of Milo Burik, the titular Wheelman who appears to be your typically stoic, guttural, and tough-as-nails Vin Diesel character. Little specific detail about the story, though we know the game kicks off with an explosive escape from a bank robbery, and you’ll end up involved with some salty Romanian gangster. The game will take place in Barcelona, and while the city will be dotted with recognizable landmarks, the actual geography of the city will be different, ostensibly for the sake of playability. The structure of the game itself seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to Atari’s Driver series, though a nice sense of speed and some over-the-top physics already set it apart.
While Midway was happy to reference films like Ronin, The Bourne Identity, Bullitt, and Vanishing Point as inspirations for Wheelman, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Burnout during my time with the game, mostly because of the prominent vehicle melee system. Rather than just grinding enemy vehicles into walls or knocking them into oncoming traffic, though, you’ll use the right analog stick to violently slam your car into enemies. The movement of your car in the vehicle melee attacks is distractingly severe at the moment, but it seems like a pretty novel take on vehicular combat.
You will also be able to perform some vehicle super-moves, one of which will be the cyclone. When triggered, the cyclone will cause the action to slow down and your car to spin around, with the perspective dropping inside the car and your control switching to Milo’s gun hand. As you spin, targets will appear on nearby enemy vehicles that, if you can hit them, will disable the vehicles. While the bulk of the action in Wheelman will take place behind the wheel, you can also expect some on-foot action, which I’m told is based on the same tech used in John Woo’s Stranglehold.
Save for the plastic-looking character model that makes Milo Burik look more like a Vin Diesel action figure than the actual dude, Wheelman looks pretty good, and I see some good potential in stuff like the vehicle melee and super-moves. Wheelman is currently slated for release on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 this fall.
23 Comments
Hopefully this will be good as Vin Deisel’s other game. Regardless I’m still excited for this it looks good so far
Those driving screenshots do look similar to Burnout.
I love fleeing the cops and driving like a maniac in GTA, being the Wheelman seems pretty cool to me.
Then again, I could just play GTA.
Riddick was a great game, but I highly doubt this will be great.
Vin Diesel was also used as a reference to remodel Agent 47 in Hitman 3 and 4.
Even though Riddick was considered a great game, I never played it because of my dislike of Vin Diesel and his films. Yes, Jeff, that includes The Fast and the Furious.
Scratch that,actually I really enjoyed The Iron Giant.
The screens for the games look kinda meh. I’d expect more from the people who got the Xbox to play nice with Chronicles of Riddick.
Will Vin be the star of all his company’s games? I wonder if, after this, Tigon can take on an impossible task: make a 50 cent game that’s actually worth playing. If they can do that, then their studio would skyrocket in popularity
Woah. I never new Vin Diesel had a company. This looks really cool!
I really liked the first Driver. It was promising. I played it on the PC with the Microsoft Sidewinder steering wheel and it was a lot of fun.
I have been waiting for the current generation iteration of Chronicles of Riddick. If Bully set the bar perhaps I shouldn’t wait.
If Tigon can pull it off, I am more than willing to invest in a new franchise. IV’s X’s and VII’s are so last-gen.
I am kind of looking forward to this one. I mean sure, I know the history with the games and the lineage of bad games but I am still optimistic!
looks just like him atleast
This actually looks like it has the potential to be fun. But I’m sure Midway will somehow ruin it.
Vin takes his games seriously, I hope this one will be seriously sweet.
I loved escape from butcher bay, so I’ll check this out when it hits the shelves.
yo this game is sick
I saw the trailer a while back ago, and it does look pretty sweet I need more info and real gameplay footage before I can make a real claim if this game is going to be good or not.
This game has promise, did anyone see the Shaun Himmerick interview. He so overwhelmed me. This game seems like little/huge bits of great games at the moment all jammed into one. As I put it on another site seems like Midway took a bite out of all the current games, then went to take a dump and this was the product. Im not saying its shit but too much of everything is never good.
Though great to see Midway producing somethin fresh that isnt a sequel and anythings better the Blacksite *Cring*
hmmm,This game actually looks as if it could be pretty damn fun. Interesting…
Sounds kind of like “Driver” which was okay. Well, the first one anyway, but I’m not sure that kind of game will fly nowadays. Guess we’ll see.
The Pacifier
Sounds pretty cool.